Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy

by Close, Frank

“Ya khochu umeret’ kak velikii fizik, a ne kak vash jebanyi shpion.”18

  “I want to die as a great scientist, not as your fucking spy.”

  Afterword

  WHEN I BEGAN THIS INVESTIGATION, I WAS SKEPTICAL ABOUT CLAIMS that Pontecorvo was a spy.

  The received wisdom has always been that he had committed some indiscretion, and that the KGB called him back to Moscow “just in time,” as the “British/Italian/Canadian [take your pick] police were about to arrest him.” However, even a cursory examination of the evidence shows such claims to have no sound foundation.

  Statements that Pontecorvo was a spy, made in 1951 by the US Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and propagated in the media at the time, were driven by McCarthyism, or based on theses that were manifestly inaccurate—such as the claim that Pontecorvo was named by Gouzenko (he was not). Often, these charges were simply asserted by fiat without any backup. It is now clear that Reed’s report was exploited by MI5, which, through selected journalists, put out versions designed to present the security services in a positive light. There are clues to MI5’s influence in many of these stories; for example, Alan Nunn May’s name is sometimes misspelled as “Allan” in the early literature, as it was in Bruno’s personal address book, which had been made available to what in effect was an MI5 ghostwriter.

  More than sixty years later, the secrecy persists: FBI papers on Pontecorvo remain classified, with whole pages blacked out, and several documents in the UK archives have their sources redacted. Others appear to have been mislaid, or misfiled. One example is the pivotal letter from Washington of July 1950, which led Philby to give Moscow the tip-off. This had been described as “lost” until December 2012, when, following persistent inquiries, I learned via Peter Hennessy that it had become “available for inspection.”

  All available sources confirm that there was no evidence in 1950 that would enable the UK authorities to “purge” Pontecorvo. The MI5 files, along with the personal diaries of senior intelligence officers, reveal the hit-or-miss reality of their trade. MI5 often had strategic successes when it infiltrated known left-wing or right-wing extremist organizations, but identifying lone spies—such as scientists who periodically passed information to the USSR for reasons of principle—was like searching for a needle in a haystack. In Pontecorvo’s case MI5 was reduced to what was euphemistically called “amicable elimination.”

  Guy Liddell encapsulated the problem in his diary. On June 2, 1950, he reviewed the case of Klaus Fuchs:

  The FUCHS case showed that another man of his kind might well be recruited for a secret project. Once the decision to hire [such a spy has been] made, there are two [opportunities] for detection: where he gets the information and when he passes it on. As the former was in [the scientist’s] brain, and he had it legally, it was impossible [to catch him in the act]. As to the latter, in FUCHS’ case there was a period of a year when he didn’t operate at all and thereafter only made contact once every three months. Unless you were on his tail for three months without detection—which was very difficult—there was very little chance of a result.

  When you considered that there were literally hundreds of cases of a prima facie kind where the evidence was far stronger than the case of FUCHS, it would be realised we were up against a formidable problem.1

  Based on Liddell’s diary and MI5 documents, it is clear that if Fuchs had not made a confession at the start of 1950, he would not have been prosecuted but instead would have been “amicably eliminated”—transferred from Harwell to a university outside the ring of security. By the spring of that year, the UK authorities were preparing to take that same action in the case of Bruno Pontecorvo; the above remarks could equally well have been made about him. MI5 was essentially impotent if faced with a lone spy who kept his head down. In the case of Pontecorvo, MI5 had suspicions but no proof.

  The most notable subsequent evidence came from Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky himself, who joined the KGB in 1963, had no dealings with Pontecorvo, but he claims to have known KGB officers who did. These individuals allegedly told Gordievsky that Pontecorvo had been a hugely valued agent during and after the war, and this anecdotal evidence is now preserved in print. However, when Gordievsky was smuggled out of the USSR into Finland in the trunk of a British diplomatic car (a mirror image of Pontecorvo’s trip thirty-five years earlier) he brought no documents bearing Pontecorvo’s name. At best, Gordievsky’s assertions appear to be based on KGB files he once read, or memories of earlier conversations. No details of the information that Pontecorvo passed to the USSR have been given, and the possibility of genuine error, due to misheard or misremembered accounts, is clearly present.

  To this day, no one who claims that Pontecorvo was a spy has ever produced verifiable evidence, nor even identified what he is supposed to have done. In Half-Life I have identified two pieces of classified material that passed from Chalk River to the USSR—a sample of uranium transferred later than Nunn May’s, and blueprints of the nuclear reactor. Although there is no proof that Pontecorvo was the source of these materials, he had both the motive and the opportunity, and on balance can be identified as the prime suspect.

  If Bruno was not approached by the Soviets during his time in Canada, then they missed an open goal. Kurchatov had followed Bruno’s career in nuclear physics closely from 1935 onward, and his first action upon taking charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project had been to set up a list of potential contacts in North America.

  Considering how efficiently the KGB responded to Kurchatov’s demand to find sources within the Western atomic project, it is unlikely that they overlooked Bruno Pontecorvo. When Kurchatov learned the names of the scientists at Chalk River, he would have recognized Bruno immediately from their joint interest in isomers. Bruno was close with Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie—whose political sympathies were no secret—and it would also be on record that Bruno had attracted the attention of Communist Party members in Paris, and joined the party himself in 1939.

  If he was approached, what can we assume about Bruno’s reaction?

  Later in his life, Bruno provided some clues when he commented on the case of Klaus Fuchs: “I would not have condemned Fuchs. He did what he thought was right and at that time the USSR were allies and not enemies of America.”2 Bruno also gave hints of his own allegiance to the communist ideal when his brother Gillo left the party following the invasion of Hungary. When Miriam Mafai interviewed Bruno thirty years later, she reported his reactions as follows: “He can not understand how Gillo can challenge the analysis of events as taken by Moscow and the leadership of the USSR. Gillo seems to have forgotten that loyalty to the USSR is one of the fundamental principles of the communist conscience.”3

  The last sentence summarizes the dogma of any truly committed communist in that era: if Moscow calls, you obey. It is the closest thing to a confession that Bruno Pontecorvo ever made.

  The KGB maintained a vice-like grip on anyone who gave even a morsel of classified information to Soviet agents. Even a casual gesture on Bruno’s part, such as providing blueprints to help his Soviet allies build a nuclear power plant for the benefit of their citizens, would be enough to put the squeeze on him later. Bruno’s statement about the importance of obedience to the USSR suggests that the refusal of any such request would have been inconceivable. This is the strongest evidence that exists of Bruno’s espionage, unless we take at face value Oleg Gordievsky’s claims that Bruno Pontecorvo was a long-term spy of major importance to the USSR who voluntarily proffered secret documents to the Soviet embassy “probably in Ottawa.”4

  Six decades after the flight from Abingdon, Gil is remarkably relaxed about the matter, as if nothing unusual took place. He also has a wry sense of humor. When I told a group of Pontecorvo relatives about Bruno’s difficulties in getting visas to exit France and reach the United States in 1940, Gil laughed and said that this probably explained why Bruno was so relaxed in the USSR. A cousin then joked that Bruno’s migration to the USSR
“had been handled by a travel agency.”5

  So why did Bruno Pontecorvo leave for the Soviet Union, and who were the “travel agents”?

  In my judgment, something sudden and unexpected prompted Pontecorvo’s flight. Gil told me that he too felt that the decision was made on the spur of the moment. Bruno’s favorite brother, Gillo, had expected to join him on an underwater fishing trip, but Bruno “had canceled at the end of August.”6 Based on the available evidence, the most likely catalyst was the Patterson letter. We can assume that Philby warned Moscow about it, and that Moscow warned Pontecorvo, possibly through the intermediary of Sereni.

  In his 1951 report, when considering who might have orchestrated Pontecorvo’s defection, Ronnie Reed identified Sereni as his prime suspect. Bruno’s brother Guido had told Reed, “Giuliana and her husband Tabet and Laura might have influenced Bruno but could not have organised anything, whereas Emilio Sereni was powerful enough to do so and quite possibly may have done.”7

  Although Bruno’s sister Anna never asked him directly for an explanation of his behavior, she thought deeply about the saga in the course of her long life. She told me, “I thought he had been kidnapped.” As to who might have kidnapped him, she had no idea, and as to how he was spirited to the USSR, she offered nothing—until after we had said goodbye. Just as her bus arrived, she unexpectedly remarked, “I never did trust Emilio Sereni.”8

  The full details of Sereni’s role in Pontecorvo’s defection may never be known. However, the possibility that Philby was its midwife now seems most probable.

  As we’ve seen, Philby discovered that the FBI was interested in “PONTECORVO’s” communist activities. It’s also been stated that he “passed on every secret” to Moscow.9 Indeed, he had tipped off Moscow about Nunn May, Fuchs, and another Los Alamos spy, Arthur Adams, so we can assume the same to be true in Pontecorvo’s case. Thus, by the end of July 1950, Moscow would be aware that the FBI was pursuing Pontecorvo.

  By that stage, Pontecorvo was on a camping trip and would not be in contact with the communist wing of his family until the end of August. It must have been when he made one of his visits to Rome by car that Moscow alerted him. The rest of the scenario is easy to imagine: aware of the FBI interest in him, Pontecorvo suddenly defects.

  It is hard to sustain a case that he would have acted so precipitously if he were totally innocent. He later claimed that a rising tide of anticommunist hysteria in the United Kingdom made him fear that innocence wouldn’t protect him, but the claim does not survive scrutiny. Being exposed as communist at that time in the United States was a serious matter, but not in England. If Bruno had been based in the US, this explanation would make sense, but given that he was living in the UK, and was already in the process of being shifted from Harwell to the safety of Liverpool, the explanation seems implausible. On balance, I feel that it would take a more certain threat to make Bruno uproot his wife and children, and his own life and work, so completely. When Philby alerted Moscow, the Soviets would have delivered a stark message to Bruno: “You’re about to be arrested. We’ve seen the proof.”

  What can we conclude about the enigmatic half-life of Bruno Pontecorvo? What further evidence might come to light?

  I have met many of the surviving actors from the 1950s, but there are loose ends nonetheless. Some individuals did not reply to my requests; others I was unsuccessful in reaching. I hope that any who read this account and have something significant to add will make contact. If the KGB files were to be opened, many questions might be answered. Meanwhile, the FBI files on Bruno Pontecorvo remain blacked out. Reading between the lines of the MI5 files, which reference collaboration with the FBI, one can infer that at least some of these redactions were driven by a desire to obscure failings by the bureau, as well as cover-ups undertaken with their British counterpart.

  The papers in London that assess the implications of Pontecorvo’s defection are notable for their failure to mention the hydrogen bomb. Given that Pontecorvo was an expert on tritium and heavy-water reactors, this is either an oversight (as the concept of the hydrogen bomb was already public knowledge), or a result of the fact that the relevant papers remain classified due to continued sensitivity about the weapon. It was this latter possibility that led me to ask whether other papers on the Pontecorvo affair existed, which in turn led to Peter Hennessy’s query, and the discovery of the “lost” file revealing Philby’s role.

  Marianne’s story remains to be told. I am grateful to the Pontecorvo family for granting me access to Bruno’s half of the correspondence between the pair in 1938–1939. Marianne’s letters, however, remain private in Sweden, and only her diary was made available to me. Reading Bruno’s half of the discourse is like overhearing one end of an intriguing phone call, and making guesses about the content of the other half. There has been speculation that Marianne was a committed communist too, and that she played an active and willing role in their decision to flee. Others, including members of the family, doubt this. A more complete understanding of Bruno’s induction into the Communist Party, and of Marianne’s attitude toward politics, could be buried in their correspondence from this time.

  Emilio Sereni’s role has been explored by Simone Turchetti. Sereni’s diaries, however, include encoded material, so there may be further opportunities there to determine what part Sereni played in organizing the defection.

  When I spoke to people who had some knowledge of the affair, but not of Pontecorvo himself, they almost invariably thought that the espionage question had been settled long ago: popular opinion had condemned Bruno Pontecorvo, notwithstanding the lack of evidence against him. This shows the power of the ex cathedra assertions of guilt made long ago, which have gained an aura of established truth through repetition. However, when I asked Bruno’s colleagues and friends whether he could ever have been a spy, they almost universally insisted, “Not Bruno! Impossible.” One colleague who had worked with Pontecorvo every day at Harwell was “very vehement” and “would stake his life that Bruno was not a spy.”10 All who knew him mentioned his openness, his childlike naïveté, and his indomitable charisma, which all contributed to their conviction that he could not possibly have had a secret life. Some claimed that Bruno was actually on record denying that he had ever been a spy.

  However, I have not seen any such explicit denial. At the 1955 press conference, for example, such questions were not allowed, and on other occasions they were avoided. In his 1992 article on Pontecorvo for the Independent, Charles Richards asked, “Had he spied for Moscow? He still does not talk about it.”11

  In any case, the character testimonials from friends and colleagues cannot be taken at face value. Far from being naive, Bruno successfully kept secrets from his closest colleagues for years. In particular, he hid his Communist Party membership from almost everyone, including Henry Arnold, the security officer at Harwell. Later, Bruno always insisted that he was against atomic weapons, yet during his time in England, when the scientific community started an active protest against militarization in nuclear physics, Bruno kept his thoughts to himself. Charisma and duplicity can coexist within the same person, as Kim Philby ably demonstrated.

  In his rapport with his colleagues, Bruno is actually similar to three established atomic spies: Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and Ted Hall. Each of them hid their clandestine work from their fellow scientists, who reacted to the subsequent exposures with incredulity.

  If the Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko had not exposed Alan Nunn May, the security authorities might never have been aware of Nunn May’s existence. His colleagues, including Bruno Pontecorvo, were astonished at the news of his treachery. When MI5 informed Wallace Akers, the director of Tube Alloys, about Nunn May, he too was “deeply shocked.” If Akers had been asked to rank the scientists employed in Canada on the basis of their integrity, he confirmed that he “would have placed May at the top.”12

  Fuchs too only surfaced due to the actions of outside parties. In his case, decrypted Soviet messages m
entioned specific details that allowed him to be identified as CHARLZ. He had fooled everyone, not least his fellow spy at Los Alamos, Ted Hall, who had thought himself to be “the only one.” As Hall’s widow explained to me, “He didn’t know about Fuchs.”13

  This takes us back to the beginning of my interest in Bruno Pontecorvo, and my conversation with Rudolf Peierls. Rudi and Genia Peierls had taken Klaus Fuchs into their home, viewing him with sympathy as a fellow émigré from fascism. They treated him almost as a member of the family, only to discover that he had fooled them. I still recall Rudi Peierls’s sadness when I asked him whether Pontecorvo too had been a spy. He replied, “You never can tell.”

  Acknowledgments

  I MUST ACKNOWLEDGE AT THE OUTSET MY SPECIAL GRATITUDE TO THE members of the extended Pontecorvo family, in particular two first-hand witnesses: Gil Pontecorvo and Anna Newton. Gil, Bruno’s eldest son, was twelve years old when the family fled from Abingdon-on-Thames (my current hometown) to the Soviet Union. Gil has first-hand memories of what really happened, in contrast to the many myths that were propagated at the time. A physicist himself, based in Russia, he also helped with translation and access to research notes and papers from Bruno’s early years in Dubna. Bruno’s sister, Anna Newton, was also invaluable, as she was with Bruno and his family in the days immediately before his defection, and her testimony helped clarify some inconsistencies in the MI5 accounts.

  In addition, I am indebted to many individuals and organizations who provided advice during my research for Half-Life, and to those who have read the manuscript in part or in its entirety. The list of helpful parties includes many scientists, both in the West and the former USSR, along with the families of former spies, members of the intelligence community, residents of Abingdon who knew the Pontecorvo family in 1950, and a host of others whom I would never have had the pleasure of meeting were it not for the surprising receipt of that query about MI5, which came from Peter Hennessy, Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield.